Attention biases preferential choice by enhancing an option's value

Does attending to an option lead to liking it? Though attention-induced valuation is often hypothesized, evidence for this causal link has remained elusive. We test this hypothesis across two studies by manipulating attention during a preferential decision and its perceptual analog. In a free-viewing task, attention impacted choice and eye movement pattern in the preferential decision more than during the perceptual analog. Similarly, in a controlled-viewing task, attention had a larger effect on choice in the preferential decision than its perceptual analog. Across these experimental manipulations of attention, choice and eye-tracking data provide converging evidence that attention enhances value, and computational modeling further supports this attention-induced valuation hypothesis. A possible explanation for our results is a normalization mechanism where attention induces a gain modulation on an option's representation at both the sensory and value processing levels.